Chellaya caught nothing that night, but he had gone too far to turn back. He gave the fisherman two rupees for the net, and hid it under a rock, and every night he went away to the solitary creek, made a little pile of his white Brahman clothes on the sand, and stepped into the shallow water with his net. There he fished until the sun sank. And sometimes now he caught fish which very reluctantly he had to throw back into the water, for he was afraid to carry them back to his wife. Very soon a strange rumour began to spread in the town that the Brahman Chellaya had polluted his caste by fishing. At first people would not believe it; such a thing could not happen, for it had never happened before. But at last so many people told the story,--and one man had seen Chellaya carrying a net and another had seen him wading in the lagoon--that everyone began to believe it, the lower castes with great pleasure and the Brahmans with great shame and anger. Hardly had people begun to believe this rumour than an almost stranger thing began to be talked of. The Brahman Chittampalam, who was Chellaya's neighbour, had polluted his caste, it was said, by carrying earth on his head. And this rumour also was true and it happened in this way. Chittampalam was a taciturn man and a miser. If his thin scraggy wife used three chillies, where she might have done with two for the curry, he beat her soundly. About the time that Chellaya began to fish in secret, the water in Chittampalam's well began to grow brackish. It became necessary to dig a new well in the compound, but to dig a well means paying a lower caste man to do the work; for the earth that is taken out has to be carried away on the head, and it is pollution for a Brahman to carry earth on his head. So Chittampalam sat in his compound thinking for many days how to avoid paying a man to dig a new well: and meanwhile the taste of the water from the old well became more and more unpleasant. At last it became impossible even for Chittampalam's wife to drink the water; there was only one way out of it; a new well must be dug and he could not bring himself to pay for the digging: he must dig the well himself. So every night for a week Chittampalam went down to the darkest corner of his compound and dug a well and carried earth on his head and thereby polluted his caste.